Animal Crossing Turns Over New Leaf for Nintendo

Video killed the radio star, and for some time now, smartphones and the cloud have slowly been doing the same to the console-gaming industry. The game Animal Crossing: New Leaf, however, is running counter to the trends.

July was another bad month for both gaming hardware and software makers, according to NPD figures released last week. Sales slumped. But the Nintendo 3DS was one clear bright spot, with both hardware and software sales rising year-on-year. 3DS console sales topped the list for the third straight month.

The July rise in hardware and software sales, like the month-earlier rise, was largely powered by one game. Animal Crossing: New Leaf, “sold more than 150,000 combined physical and digital units in its second month on the market, bringing its lifetime total to more than 660,000 combined units,” Nintendo wrote in a statement after the NPD report.

It had been some time since I’d done any DS gaming, but the numbers spurred me to go back to it and see why it’s helping Nintendo — whose flagship Wii U console has underperformed, mostly due to a lack of good game titles. I picked up a 3DS XL and the new Animal Crossing game and spent several days playing as the mayor of Najville.

I can’t say I’m a huge 3DS fan. While I like the matte, metallic blue color (though it shows every oily fingerprint) and the sturdy hinge, I am not enamored of the clamshell form-factor and find the device rather heavy and clunky. I remember when I first played the original DS, I admired its sleekness and small size.

But I am a fan of this latest title in the Animal Crossing franchise, now over a decade old. After a steady diet of time-wasters and instant-gratification shooting and sports games, it took me a couple of hours to adjust myself to this title’s more-serene pace.

For the uninitiated, Animal Crossing is the “Seinfeld” of the gaming world. It’s essentially a game about nothing, where the mundane is celebrated as great achievement: building a house, adding on a room, saying “hi-di-ho” to your neighbors, fishing, paying your debts, buying and selling furniture.

The earlier games for the DS and GameCube were fun, not captivating. But they weren’t much to look at, typical cartoonish animation. New Leaf is the best-looking Animal Crossing yet, and the feel is very much Nintendo Wii-like, but in your hand. You can easily identify your animal friends and neighbors. Items and patterns are clearly discernible. I did, however, have to shut off the 3D switch. The game definitely looked 3D on the top screen, but the rolling motions of my character and objects on the screen were making me nauseous, even on the lowest possible setting.

New Leaf also has some unexpected plot twists that add depth to the game, making it far more engaging and playable than previous versions. While events are very slow to develop in the New Leaf world — they happen in realtime, just like they do in the real world — there’s an addictiveness to this. I kept logging out and coming back, hoping to get a new task or opportunity to build or buy or sell something. That’s a sign of a strong game.

My game journey began in a very unpromising way, on a virtual train ride, with a pesky animal traveler grilling me in an annoying 8-bit-NES-sounding warble, accompanied by text on the screen, about where I was headed. The point was to have me enter my name, birthday and the name of the town where I was headed. That became important when I stepped off the train at the next station. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself, a human among animals, welcomed by residents as the mayor of their town.

You don’t need to have played or appreciated the earlier versions of Animal Crossing to enjoy New Leaf. But if you have previously played, you’ll find controls mostly familiar, though a bit more-complex than they were previously. The game is very intuitive, and I can easily see pre-teens, as well as adults, warming to this game.

You need to approach and face characters to engage them and press the “A” button to converse with them. You can either use the lower touch screen or the “A” button and the D-pad to select answers to questions.

You take out objects in your inventory with the “X” button, activate them by facing up to them and hitting the “A” button, and put them away with the “Y” button. Very simple. Ditto for the inventory and other menus. Everything can be accessed with the four lettered buttons or using your stylus or finger on the touch screen. I kept the volume down for the annoying blippety-blip conversations, but turned it back up for the lovely soundtrack that seemed to have music appropriate for any time of the day.

I found the tutorials masked as conversations less-intrusive and just better than in previous Animal Crossing iterations. I was somewhat less-charitable in that estimation after I failed to save my progress and had to do the first 45 minutes of the game over again, including every, single tutorial conversation. And that was after a mole, aptly named, Mr. Resetti, gave me a goofy lecture about remembering to save my game before exiting — something you do with the 3DS “start” button. Suitably chastisted, I plowed on.

Besides wanting to review this game, I found myself asking the question, “why would I want to play New Leaf?” There’s, on the surface, very little there to excite. You watch a fireworks show, you get a mosquito bite and say stupid things like, “itchy, itchy, itchy.” Yet, I would check into Najville at least three times a day, already wondering about what my next task what or what I was going to buy, build or sell next. I liked getting appraisals of something’s worth from the owl. I kept trying to figure out how to get the money I needed to build the next thing I wanted to build.

While New Leaf centers action around the mundane, it’s a much more-meaningful game than earlier versions. It’s no longer just about you and your possessions and your home that you build, change or expand. I credit the makers with making the player town mayor and making you responsible for improving the town through public works. You can build bridges and other public works and structures or change rules, like store opening hours.

Though your town, as it appears on the lower-screen map, is fairly small, gameplay is somehow vast. I feel confident I could play New Leaf for months without running out of tasks and projects. And if you get bored with your own town, there’s a resort island you can go to. Apart from growing or catching more-exotic species of flora and fauna and being able to do some diving, the multiplayer game mode lets you travel to the resort in a group and engage in games inside the game. Win, and your awards can be converted into currency.

I started out in Najville by having to live in a tent. Like the real world, I found myself wishing that currency was easier to come by. There were no salary advances for Mr. Mayor, and no shortcuts, dicsounts or kickbacks in getting building permits or paying for premises and furnishings. I couldn’t even buy a cookie at the fireworks festival my second night in the town because I had no money.

This is, without a doubt, the most-social version of Animal Crossing ever and one that lets you use all the 3DS capabilities, including its camera. Sharing is built into the game through StreetPass, SpotPass, DreamSuite and a QR scanner you can acquire. With the passes, you can view or “visit” other players’ homes, copying their layouts or ordering their furniture from your town store. The QR scanner lets you copy patterns from images online and share them with other players. You can visit other towns through the DreamSuite, though the town you visit is chosen at random, and you can’t take back anything from those towns, except for patterns.

Though I enjoyed playing Animal Crossing: A New Leaf and would recommend it to others, I have two quibbles, one of them related to hardware, the other to gameplay, itself.

First, the 3DS, at around $180, is too expensive, though the game at around $35 retail, isn’t overly pricey. I recently tested the Ouya, a fully functional Android-based gaming console with Internet connectivity that costs only $99, and will be testing NVidia’s Shield console this week. That has a Retina-quality five-inch screen, a full-sized controller and the ability to stream PC games from Steam, all for $299. The 3DS is ripe for a price cut, but with it leading the way in console sales — again, largely due to the success of gaming titles like Animal Crossing — there will be very little incentive for Nintendo to drop the price.

And, not to weird anyone out, but the longer I thought about it, Animal Crossing: A New Leaf, struck me as creepily moralistic. I don’t know that any nine-year-olds who play it will get far beyond, “Look, mom, a talking dog!” but I found myself wondering whether the game’s developers intended to imbue it with a sophisticated social model, one that’s almost an implicit critique of most modern societies.

What bothers me is that the world of Animal Crossing is just a bit too Stepford Wives-perfect. The decisions you make on cost and color or pattern seem trivial when you realize that whatever you choose, you can’t choose to color outside the lines.

I like civil society and I believe in consensus, but Animal Crossing takes them to an extreme. For example, to get permission to start improving your town by building things, you, the mayor, need to get a permit. To secure that document, a 70% or 80% approval rating — admirable for most politicians — just won’t suffice. No, you need a 100% approval rating from your townspeople.

The result is that you’re forced to be social, to interact with others in your offline town. That, in turn, prepares you for the online sharing world, where you connect to the Internet and throw open the town gates to let other players come and visit or go out and visit their towns.

This is all good, but Game Theory (the actual theory, not this column) has gone out the window in New Leaf. While there’s a money and commerce component to the game, interactions are a bit too friendly, and nobody is really allowed to be greedy or opportunistic.

In my town of Najville, I craved a usurious shop owner, or at least a few rebels to challenge and debate me on new structures I built or rules I created, someone to throw a rock through the Town Hall windows. Alas, there were none. That was probably a good thing, because I didn’t see a single police officer, jail or a can of pepper spray.

Curiously, while the game won’t let you name things in what its makers deem an inappropriate way, I did find a way to vent the Utopic gasses by lacing my online interactions with aggressive comments, just to see if I could. I wasn’t overtly rude, as I didn’t want to scar any youngsters, but I did want to see what I could get away with.